We've finally gotten our T-Mobile G2 in house, and it goes on sale in the coming days at T-Mobile stores (a few have it now) and at Radio Shack right now. The G2 is the spiritual successor to the G1, also made by HTC. To that end it runs the pure Google Android experience, and that means vanilla Froyo 2.2 with no HTC Sense software. Sorry, Sense fans. Thankfully HTC and T-Mobile didn't decide to continue with the ugly duckling looks-- the G2 is a nice looking phone, though perhaps not as sexy as the skinny Samsung Vibrant. It looks like a cousin to the Nexus One with modern lines and metal tones.

As you can see from the photo above, the G2's CPU blows away every other Android phone in Quadrant's benchmark application. That's quite surprising given the Qualcomm MSM ARM7 family CPU running at 800MHz. It sure doesn't sound like it could beat the 1GHz Hummingbird CPU used in the Galaxy S phones (Vibrant). Of course, some of that speed comes from Froyo 2.2 which is markedly faster than prior Android releases. Since it runs vanilla Android, it's also not bogged down by software customizations. We'll reserve final judgment until Froyo is available for the Vibrant. I will say that this phone is simply lightening fast.

The G2's big claim to fame is HSPA+, otherwise known as T-Mobile's flavor of 4G. We got speeds as fast as 8.3Mpbs down and 1.5Mpbs up. That's slightly faster than we saw on our WiFi 802.11n connection for download speeds, but slower than WiFi for uploads. Our Vibrant in comparison, got 5.6Mbps down in the same test location. What a shame T-Mobile had the WiFi hotspot application removed from the G2-- it would make a wicked wireless high speed modem. I'm sure the folks at XDA Developers will find a way to bring it to the G2 soon.

Yes, the smartphone is supposed to have 4 gigs of storage and ours reports only 1.2 gigs. We're still awaiting an answer as to where all that storage memory went. It really seems like the G2 got only 2 gigs like the overseas version, the HTC Desire Z.